In the bustling post-revolutionary New England of the early 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau discovered in transcendentalism, what they believed were grounds for the ultimate hope of mankind. Against the background of slavery and mercantilism, American transcendentalism converted the romantic idealization of the common man into an assertion of all men and their equality before God. The transcendentalist belief in the infinite potentialities of the common man gave greatness to the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. American transcendentalists explored the psychological ramifications and implications raised by this belief, often termed "The American Dream."
In his lecture, in Boston in 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson stated, "Whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought is popularly called at the present day Transcendental . . . there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions and to give them, at least in our creed, all authority over our experience, . . . " (Emerson 104). This illustrates Emerson's confidence in his own intuition and imagination, as well as that of future mankind. In the same lecture, Emerson further illustrated this point by asking, "What is the privilege and nobility of our nature but its persistency, through its power to attach itself to what is permanent?" (Emerson 109). Emerson appears to be supremely confident that the mind of man is so noble that it will instinctively select permanent and universally uplifting and beneficial values applicable to all humanity.
Emerson's statement (Bradley, et al. 1281) regarding the lessons one can learn from space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, animals and other elements in the universe, indicates the marriage, or unity of matter and mind. This is an important belief of transcendentalists.
Emerson postulated further in his lecture in 1842, "Shall we say then that transcendentalism is the...